Yoni’s Story (Part 3 of 3)

yoni_rachokWhat was it like for you to lose your faith?

It was very difficult for me to lose my faith. I really did enjoy every aspect of being frum. I enjoyed learning and davening. I liked the frum look. When I was growing up I dreamt of having sons with long, curly payes. I liked feeling connected to generations before me who I was following in their path.

I especially connected to the idea of having a Loving Father in Heaven who I can trust is making sure everything is working out and who I can turn to whenever I needed anything.

This helped me to understand that the truth lied in the opposite of what many religious people like to say. My bias was that the Torah should be true, not like frum people say that non-believers have a bias that it shouldn’t be. The allure of being connected to the All-Powerful Omnipotent Being as His beloved Jewish child is much stronger than we realize.

It hurt me to understand that I had no reason to believe in God, as much as I really wanted to. I had every reason not to believe in Torah, as much as I loved it.

The first shabbos that I was in Boro Park after I had really started to lose my faith, I remember walking down the street and thinking about the men in their bekitches and shtreimels. Just a short time before that I had felt that a shtreimel was a special way to identify with our ancestors, by keeping their traditional clothing, and thereby to connect with our Jewishness, and from there to God. And now, for the first time, I saw them – and myself – as fools who were wearing this outlandish outfit to connect to a fantasy that had never really existed.

It hit me how scary it was that millions of people have lost their lives and are continuing to lose their lives because of some political move of giving Yoshiyahu a Sefer Devarim, setting off a chain reaction leading to a group of people believing that they are God’s Chosen People who must give their lives for that belief, and spinning off world religions who spent centuries fighting for world domination.

It was horrible to realize how the lives of everyone I know were being controlled by nothing more than a bluff.

What are your plans in regard to staying or leaving?

At the time I initially lost my faith, I thought that I would just pick up and leave. But then I thought about it and I realized how many people I would have to answer up to, from my own family, my wife and her family, and everyone who knows us. I couldn’t imagine having to face up to all of them and have to answer up.

I once saw a blogger write that in order to leave, one needs something to push you out or to pull you out. I would try making a list of the pros and cons of leaving or staying. I felt that that I didn’t have any personal negative experiences being frum, so there wasn’t anything pushing me out. And I couldn’t think of anything I was really missing on the outside that would be pulling me out. Not to say that I wasn’t missing anything, just nothing that i could think of that would justify leaving or facing up to everyone I know.

But today I find it very taxing on me emotionally to keep up this charade. Having to pretend and to hide myself to the extent which I do now seems to me a good enough reason why I should have left. The problem is, the older I get the more difficult it is to just get up and go. I feel that my only choice is to build up the courage to just get out.

How does your observance look today?

I went on for a few years pretending all the way. I came to shul, said shiurim, and did everything I was supposed to. I convinced myself that I would be able to say the words of davening even if I didn’t believe in it, and that I would be able to say shiurim in things I didn’t believe in.

But as time went on, it started becoming a real burden to daven and say words mindlessly. Little by little I stopped going to shul. I started hating to give shiurim, to try motivating people to live up to ideas which I believed to be pure bluff.

Now, unless I’m with people I have to keep a show for, I don’t daven, make berachos, etc. I let myself read and watch watch what I want, etc. But for the most part I still look the part.

I decided to get a degree, and I chose Social Work.

What were your motives in choosing Social Work?

One reason was that I’ve had experience in helping people in a non-professional way. I wanted to learn what science and academia has to say on the subject.

Another reason is that I saw it as an opportunity to get a rounded education in the social sciences. Here in Israel, at least, to get a degree in Social Work it’s necessary to take courses on a wide variety of social sciences, such as sociology, criminology, psychology of course, ethics, etc.

Of course, knowing the hard sciences certainly could help a person come to heresy. But I found that even the humanities and social sciences can have a significant influence, and in some ways even more. They might have a larger margin of error than physics, but at the end of the day, all of their claims have to be backed up by research, and presented with empirical testing.

Torah, besides its claims about the world which can be disproven through simple biology, zoology, history and archeology, also makes claims about the human, or Jewish psyche, sexology, sociology, and criminology. The deep insights of Chassidus and Mussar claim to know how and why we do things and what would be the healthiest way to live and conduct our relationships and society. When you hold them up to what objective empirical research has to say about all of that, you realize how so many of the assumptions of religion are just so plain wrong.

Even to learn a philosophical or psychological approach to ethics helped me to understand just how shallow and childish the frum approach is to good and evil, right and wrong. The same thing when you learn a little bit about art, writing, storytelling.

Do you think there’s anything that the frum world could have done to keep you ‘on the derech’?

Not really. Being that I’m a naturally curious person, I would have eventually found everything out anyways. I’m impressed that they were able to keep me in for so long, and frankly, I’m embarrassed with myself that I let them.

Not having access to internet or libraries without taking the risk of getting into trouble only worked to an extent, but for someone who really wants to know, it can’t go on forever. I probably would have found books eventually, somehow, I just don’t know when.

I never understood the internet ban. Whoever wants to find anything out will eventually. Whoever wants to access the internet will do it anyways.

Is there anything that provides you with purpose and meaning in life now that you no longer believe in Orthodox Judaism?

OJ does all the work for you. It tells you what your meaning in life should be, and it also tells you that there’s no meaning besides what it teaches. I find that condescending. Unless you’re God Almighty, who are you to tell me what’s meaningful and what’s not?

You know, I feel that I find more meaning in looking into myself and searching for what’s really important to me and what I really care about, instead of having someone else tell me what I should want and feel. That search in itself gives me meaning and a reason to live.

Are there any misconceptions or stereotypes about OTD people that you’d like to correct?

Of course. Most of all, the misconception that I had that there’s nothing out there besides taavos and that’s why people leave or choose not to believe.

I think the frum community subconsciously knows that it’s dangerous to acknowledge that Haskala is not dead, and that there are more than plenty of intellectual reasons why not to believe. They know that it’s dangerous to consider that there might be sociological and psychological benefits to not living frum, and that there may be ways to find meaning outside of the frum world.

In recent years the frum community has begun to understand that not all their parents, rabbis and authority figures are trustworthy, and that their own communities aren’t heaven on earth. But they still don’t let themselves see that the outside world isn’t hell, and that there is something intelligent and intellectual, and even meaningful, to not being a believer.

Also, the idea as if belief is necessarily connected to happiness, as if a happy person with a happy life would never consider questioning his faith. It’s as if you dared question, it must be that you have something emotional which is pushing you. For some reason, the emotional ulterior motives of Baalei Teshuvah aren’t questioned.

Everyone, if you look deep enough, has some type of issue. I see that frum people, instead of dealing with the threats to their faith head-on, rush to find that issue and blow it up. They’ll blame your mother and your rabbeim and which chassidus you were part of, etc. They insist that something else must be pushing you other than intellectual honesty.

To close off our interview, is there anything you would like to give along to people like you who are still ‘in the closet’?

I find chizuk in reading and hearing about people who did take the step. But I’ve come to understand that everyone has a unique predicament. There are so many reasons and variables why someone would choose to stay or to leave, or how much to cover up or divulge. This means that not only shouldn’t we be judging other people for their decisions – we also shouldn’t be judging ourselves, comparing ourselves to others and wondering why can’t we just be like them?

At the same time, I do believe that many of us, and I myself am guilty of this, are sometimes afraid of our own shadow, and tend to exaggerate our fears or how difficult our situation is. Yes, we’ve all heard the horror stories that can happen when someone takes a step. We certainly are entitled to choose for ourselves to endure one difficulty in order to prevent something worse. But often, irrational fear prevents me, prevents us, from being true to ourselves in whatever amount of freedom we really do still have for ourselves.

One of the things I’ve learned in my study of psychology, is that often the things that I’m afraid of are nothing more than things I’ve been conditioned into avoiding over my lifetime. In other words, more often than not there really isn’t what to be scared of, just we’ve trained ourselves over so many years to avoid those things which cause us to feel that fear and anxiety.

This is true about phobias and anxieties, and it’s also true about social phobias, the fear of presenting ourselves confidently as we really are, the fear of making ourselves vulnerable. I feel that the few times which I let myself choose not to give into my fears helped me to see that things can turn out much better than I would have previously imagined.


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5 responses to “Yoni’s Story (Part 3 of 3)”

  1. […] Yoni’s Story (Part 3 of 3) […]

  2. Max Avatar
    Max

    Hi Reb Yoni,

    Can you tell us why the kuzari proof is not true?
    I find it to be very strong.
    Thanks

  3. Yoni Avatar
    Yoni

    Hi Max,

    The Kuzari “proof” is not a proof – it’s a weak argument, a logical fallacy.

    The argument is: The Torah claims to have been given in front of millions of people, i.e. mass revelation. Such a claim can’t be made up and a large population can’t be convinced of it, as we see that no one else has ever made this claim, so the Torah must be true.

    But if you think into it, the argument is based on unsubstantiated, unverified assumptions.

    We would only know that the Torah had witnesses to its giving from the Torah itself. That would be using a claim to prove itself, which we call circular reasoning. So we need something else independent of the claim to verify it.

    So now we come to the claim that a large population can’t be convinced of something like that. How can it be verified that a claim of mass revelation can’t be made up? Has an experiment ever been conducted in which we tried to convince a large population of mass revelation, in which the conditions would be similar to the conditions alleged to have been in place when the Israelites were convinced? As long as such an experiment has never taken place, we can’t make the argument that a claim of mass revelation can’t be made up.

    This is what we call making an empirical argument. If you have to make unverified assumptions in order to make your argument, all you have is a weak argument, not a proof. Science doesn’t do that.

    So then we’re left with the question, if it could have been made up, why didn’t anyone else try it? In other words, we have a question for which we don’t know the answer for, so instead of just leaving the question with a צריך עיון, we rush to say it must have been… We call that an argument from ignorance. Not knowing the answer to Question A doesn’t prove that B is true. It just means that you don’t know the answer to Question A. And besides that, can we even verify that no one else ever tried, and can we verify that no one was successful?

    So in other words, the Kuzari argument is a combination of circular reasoning, unverified assumptions, and arguments from ignorance.

  4. Sabi A-Libee Avatar

    Well put. The claims of rationalists of all religions aside (Rambam, Thomas Aquinas and Averroes, etc.), all religious beliefs basef on divine revelation are inherently unrational and not subject to empirical proof.

  5. max Avatar
    max

    Hi,

    you write ” some political move of giving Yoshiyahu a Sefer Devarim, setting off a chain reaction leading to a group of people believing that they are God’s Chosen People ”

    What does this mean? where can I read more on what you are arguing here?

    Thanks

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